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Posted on 10/15/2005 6:51:48 AM PDT by NYer
Edited on 10/15/2005 6:59:54 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers' long-ago doings on the Dallas City Council and parsing the Byzantine comings and goings of the Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most momentous event of our lifetime - what is left of it, as I shall explain. It was announced last week that American scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu. This is big. Very big.
(Excerpt) Read more at buffalonews.com ...
Seems to me that toying around with flu viruses doesn't involve that new a technology. With enough willing suicidojihadis available, they can test their germs in humans where it's going to count (who cares if mice get sick?)
Did i read somewhere that the average age of the population is getting too high for the burearcrats sensitivities? Time for a planned "ooops, sorry but that"? Think they wouldn't do it??????
While devastating, the Spanish Flu is hardly a civilization ending catastrophy. 25-40 million people worldwide died because of the Flu in the 1918-19 outbreak, and roughly 20% of the people who caught it died. While viral in nature, many of the deaths were caused by secondary bacterial pneumonia infections, which we can fight with anti-bacterial medications.
And a very stupid one IMO. What are these people thinking?
Yep, someone said this, and someone very credentialed in his field, but it is patently false. The Black Plague was easily the mose important disease pandemic in human history, followed by a number of others more important than the Spanish Influenza.
Yeah, I think they wouldn't do that, especially as Spanish flu was pretty indiscriminate and killed people regardless of their age.
PS. The smallpox plague of Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius was rather consequential as well, and some argue might've indirectly led to the fall of Rome three centuries later. The Plague of Justinian put an end to his quest to restore the full extent of the Empire, and likely paved the way for the later defeat of the Byzantines by the Muslims, who would otherwise have remained a marginal Arabian sect. Also, the Periclean Plague would almost certainly rank higher too. So would the plague that decimated the Aztecs as well as the one that killed the Atahualpa of the Incas before the Spaniards arrived and also the plague that led to the downfall of the Ming Dynasty in China.
on the other hand, I thought that the making of an antidote involved working with the virus itself (i'm in over my head here).
A cargo plane carrying small amounts of flu virus crashed on railway tracks near Winnipeg's city center Thursday, killing the pilot but missing buildings and vehicles, authorities said.----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aw, do not worry!
I'm sure when the plane crashes
carrying this stuff,
the fire will destroy
all the samples on the plane . . .
Trust the scientists . . .
But nuclear destruction by comparison is fairly selective.
This Spanish flu virus is completely non-selective. It will kill Osama as easily as the soccer moms and dads he hates so much.
Yes it is. Because now that we know what it is (turns out it was the bird flu not the swine flu as previously thought) we can work on ways to counteract it.
Nature is the ultimate recycler. What came around once will come around again. Some of us would prefer to have a fighting chance. If you don't like it I suggest that you stick your fingers in your ears and hum really loudly!
Back in the days of my undergrad days, when talk of this type
of technology was big, I remember one of my professors telling me
he thought it was time to start heading to Mars, cuz he understood
that not only could they resurrect old stuff, but they could
add other genomic sequences that could cause other effects...
the important stuff is that they could alter these viruses
to do more than would occur with normal "life" variations..
In fact, my colleages and I were asked to reconstitute and make ready for
injection, certain viral preparations that
were to be used in patients where the virus was to be injected
to the patient, and it would carry a genomic sequence to
certain body cells, and make the cells carry out different
functions...I think the term is called "transfection"...
they're also trying that with cancer....certain cells are
susceptible to different chemicals when a certain genomic element
is present, so they are "transfecting" the cancer cells with
the genome, then treating the cancer cell with the appropriate
molecule.
I haven't researched the final results of the studies, and I
haven't heard much yet, so I suspect the jury is still out
as to the effectiveness of this approach.
P.S. "Zero" is a concept. And also a semantic conundrum. I mean
how can you have "something" that is "nothing"? If it's nothing,
it cannot exist, therefore it can't be "something"....just
for your philosophical perusal....Ha! Wouldn't mind hearing your
thoughts on that anyway.
The screen name actually comes from the liner notes of the X-Files soundtrack. At the very top of the first page it reads, "Nick Cave and The Dirty Three would like to remind you that zero is also a number." It turns out that if you track back on the CD past the first song there are two hidden songs by the aforementioned artists. Being a giant leaping dork of a Nick Cave fan, I thought that this was pretty cool and picked-up the name "Zeroisanumber" soon afterwards.
Looks like Charles has had one too many.
Yes, it's scary, yes, it's dangerous. But until we know what the Spanish Flu is, we won't have the means of defeating it.
We are on the brink of a bird flu pandemic that has the potential to be just as devastating as the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed anywhere from 50 to 100 million people within a few months. Those most vulnerable weren't the young and elderly. For some unknown reason, healthy adults dropped liked flies. They'd get sick in the morning and be dead by afternoon.
As one who gets whacked every flu season, with the flu shots only being 50% effective for me, I've no doubt if we lose containment of the bird flu and it becomes a pandemic; I'm as good as dead.
My only hope of survival is if scientists decode what made the Spanish Flu so deadly, create mechanisms to defeat it, and disseminate the tools and information to the public before the next pandemic hits.
We are racing against the clock - bird flu has infected over a hundred already and killed half of its victims. It's now landed in Europe and Turkey. Unless the knowledge of the Spanish Flu is released to the world with teams all over the globe trying to defeat it, it's going to get really ugly over the next little while.
"Yeah, I think they wouldn't do that, especially as Spanish flu was pretty indiscriminate and killed people regardless of their age."
If you check stories about the Spanish Flu, you find that it mostly spared the young and the old. It preferred folks in the prime of their lives.
Bitt, didn't you have a linked reference?
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